“I’m a football player.”

Imagine finding two people who make that claim. As you talk to them you discover some interesting details…

• Jeremy is on a team with an area high school. He does conditioning exercises year round. He goes to camp in the summer. When practices begin in the fall, he goes through running exercises and drills. He dutifully follows the instructions of the coaches and assistant coaches. He spends a lot of his extra-curricular time in workouts and practices. He learns play patterns and collaborates with teammates to execute offensive schemes and learn the defensive plays. And when Friday night comes, he puts on the pads, helmet, cleats, and uniform, and goes out on the field with his teammates. Win or lose, he plays his heart out.
• Brian, by contrast, says this: “I don’t think you have to be on a team to be a good football player. I just like to play in my own way. I practice with a ball in my backyard, throwing it through a hoop when I have the time.”

Here’s a question: Is Brian really a football player? There’s definitely a big difference between what Jeremy and Brian are doing.

Some people do the same thing with the church. They say things like, “I don’t think you have to go to church to be a good Christian. I practice my religion in my own way. I don’t go to church.”

The problem here is that a Christian without a church is like a football player without a team. Christianity has always been a team sport. When Jesus began His work, He called together twelve disciples (Mark 3:13-18). The earliest Christians were baptized into a new identity as part of faith communities (Galatians 3:26-29). And Christians have always been commanded not to break the habit of fellowship – getting together and drawing strength from other Christians (Hebrews 10:24-25).

Sometimes we can be lured, though, by popular religious tendencies. This is true in any age and with any people group. God commanded the ancient Israelites not to be lured in by the Canaanite practices of sorcery, fortune-telling, necromancy, and child-fire rituals (Deuteronomy 18:9-14). As they blended with the crowd, there was a risk that they would take on the crowd’s religious practices and lose their faith and identity.

We who are Christians run that same risk today. Work and social situations require us to be around unchurched people in a highly secularized culture. And just like teenagers, we can take to the habits of our peers – with religious practices as much as anything else. Solo Christianity can become a real threat – even if it is (at the least) a highly compromised form of Christianity, or (at the most) a non-Christian heresy.

God has better things in store for us, my friends. When we are Christians we are part of a family (Mark 3:31-35). This is not just a spiritual union, but also one that works like a body having different parts (I Corinthians 12:12-31). It’s a corporate joining of believers in congregational life that bears fruit for the kingdom of God.

So come and be a part of the family. We’re open every Sunday!

 God bless you,

Andrew McHenry, Pastor

Maple Hill Community Congregational Church